


No Harm Ever Came From Reading a Cookbook.....

by chicagoartnerd



Category: Betty Crocker Cookbook
Genre: Dark Magic, Gen, Humor, Lovecraftian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 15:54:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,611
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/599544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chicagoartnerd/pseuds/chicagoartnerd
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Riley, an ambitious batterwitch in training, seeks to summon something powerfully tasty from "The Big Red." But she must first sneak into her mother's pantry to retrieve the necessary ingredients and spellbook/cookbook.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Harm Ever Came From Reading a Cookbook.....

**Author's Note:**

  * For [KathsAvery](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KathsAvery/gifts).



> This is a Yuletide "treat" for KathsAvery as I am not signed up for Yuletide but wanted to write something for it anyway. While skimming the requests I saw one for "Betty Crocker Cookbook" and just had to write something humorous and dark for it. And yes I did get the term "batterwitch" from Homestuck, but we all take inspiration where we can get it right? Beware there are baking/sweets related puns ahead. Who knows maybe there will be more stories of batterwitches battling Eldritch horrors in the future.

Riley knew she wasn’t supposed to go to the basement pantry. That was where the adults kept the pure cane sugar extract and high quality organic flour for only the most sacred of ceremonies.

It was also where they kept the family cookbooks.

Relics of meals and rituals long past. Tomes full of powerful knowledge and even more powerful Bisquick recipe ideas. 

But she wasn’t going down there for any of the family made grimoires. She was seeking out the most dangerous book of the lot, the Necro-nom-nomicon of Nutty bars, The Big Red.

The bottom stair creaked as she hopped from it to the dusty cement floor of the basement and carefully made her way over to the pantry.

Riley knew the door was sealed with a syrup spell but luckily they had gone over how to deactivate those last week.  

She was still a year away from her Abakening but she wanted to get a leg up on her cousins and brother, who was only two weeks out. Riley was certain if she could just learn some spells from the Betty Crocker Cookbook her parents would see that she could be just as good a batterwitch, no better, than her brother Eddie.

She whipped out her long red spoon and let it hover over the sealed door,

_“ **Sticky sweet pancake treat obey my will and retreat!**_ ”

The door made a sucking pop as it swung open to reveal the rows of shelves full of ingredients and books.

She looked down before taking a step over the threshold and sure enough there was a cinnabun swirl glowing orange with power.

It was her mother’s sigil, a sign leftover from magic cast. If she had stepped on it then the entire house would have known what she was up to in a heartbeat.  

There had to be a way around it.

She hadn’t learned the fluffy whisking spell yet otherwise she could have just floated over it. Then it hit her. If she could jump on to the closest shelf and then travel by shelves without touching the ground the spell wouldn’t activate.

It would be like playing a real life game of the black-checkered tiles being made of molten marshmallow.

She smiled to herself, unlike Eddie, to whom cookie-casting came so easy-bakeily, she knew not all problems could or should be solved by magic.  

Riley took a deep breath and several steps back and then ran, jumping for nearest shelf. She made it but the whole structure shook violently, and jars of blessed baking soda chattered angrily at her. It was a good thing she wasn’t as tall or wide as Eddie or her cousin Sarah, otherwise she would have tipped the shelf right over by jumping on it. 

Instead she carefully inched her way along the bottom, gingerly stepping over large sacks of fragrant flour and sparkling sugar.

The last row of shelves towards the back was emptier and was right across from the wooden bookshelf full of well-worn editions of the original 1936 edition _The Joy of Cooking_ and the 1933 _Betty Crocker's 101 Delicious Bisquick Creations, As Made and Served by Well-Known Gracious Hostesses, Famous Chefs, Distinguished Epicures and Smart Luminaries of Movieland._

Priceless though they were they weren’t the ones she was looking for.

On the lowest ledge rested the giant full color red cookbook that held the spell she was after.

After nearly dropping it twice she managed to swing it from its perch to where she was sitting across from it on the metallic shelving.

She set it on her lap to begin flipping through chapters but as soon as she opened it the book let out a piercing sigh and started to move through various pages of its own accord. As the recipes went whizzing by her minds’ eye she couldn’t help but feel slightly ill at ease.

Maybe there was a reason apprentices weren’t allowed to open the book until after their Abakening.

To the untrained eye most of the recipes looked to be delicious but for ordinary things like walnut brownies or pineapple upside down cake.

Truthfully, to an experienced batterwitch, they were detailed instructions on how to control some one’s mind, or open a portal half way round the world.

Luckily she didn’t want to raise the souls of dead children and fuse them in to gingerbread bodies. Riley just wanted to summon some one, or perhaps more accurately, something from one of the other dimensions. Nothing too fancy, like a black forest cake with cherry ganache filling.

The correct page snapped like a newly folded sheet, her finger dragged across the massive section on Bisquick and stopped on what she was looking for.

It required a very old box of General Mills flour, with the coupon for Oneida flatware still within, which would be used as a effigy to burn in homage to the Old One. The spell also required one and a half cups of cocoa powder, one cup of pure and consecrated cane sugar, baking soda and powder, and a pinch of Dead Sea salt.

Most troubling though was that it would take a great deal of power as well as six drops of human blood to activate the summoning circle.

Shrugging off her unease Riley leapt and sprung from shelf to shelf collecting her ingredients like a diligent magpie. 

Then set about the task of pouring out the summoning circle. At the center was placed an old metal whisking bowl for her blood. She cringed as she cut her finger and counted the exact right amount of drops, blood was like food coloring too much and it ruined the frosting.

Then she gulped and touched the tip of her spoon to the edge of the circle clearly intoning the incantation,

_Sugar, flour, eggs, cocoa, and butter,_

_Grease the pan with hands a flutter._

_Preheat the oven, pour the mix,_

_Summon things below, betwixt._

_Elder Gods of cooking lore,_

_Take this offering first then come for more._

_My name is Riley Hitchman and I’m not off my rocker,_

**_but I call to me now The Betty Crocker!”_ **

The Oneida coupon twitched and rose into the air before flickering to life with flames and lighting the whole circle ablaze.

It glowed blinding red before it reached her blood and then turned the crackling green of her magic, snuffing out the circle and leaving only the scribble of her Haystack sigil etched on the bottom rung of the shelf.  

She glared down at it in disappointment, everyone had always made fun of her sigil because it looked like scribbles, not like Eddie’s whose was a jelly role, a reference to their mother and grandmother’s sigils. But now she hated it even more as it glowed an eerie green in the dark pantry. 

Because it was also a symbol of her failure to summon one of the original batterwitches.

Supposedly there was no such person as Betty Crocker. She was a Tulpa of sorts, a mythological figure given a life of her own by generations of being beloved of hungry people. 

But every sugar summoner knew that Agnes White Tizard, was an anagram for The Singee Wizard, among other less comprehensible names such as S’nath-erhrd and Wgaheth the Red One.

In other words she was an Old God of unimaginable power.

And if Riley had succeeded in summoning her then she would have known the secrets of their kind, batter-mancy, and possibly the entire order of the known multi-verse.

She shut the book with a hollow thump and shivered as she reached across the gap to put it away, but as she was tipping it back into place the shelf shook violently.

With a yelp of panic she dropped it to the floor causing the door ward to blink menacingly.

Riley cursed and was about to sprint for the exit when she saw a tiny golden teaspoon sitting in the center of the summoning circle where the bowl full of her blood had been.

Strangely the dark pantry faded and she was staring only at the teaspoon etched with sifting vine-like runes that glowed with a ruddy red light.

The object seemed to pulsate in her sight, almost like it was breathing and out with humming power. As she reached for it her vision narrowed even further, turning fuzzy with unnerving low whispers in a foreign tongue.

They grew louder and louder and scraped at her ears, down her throat and chest as her hand hovered above the piping hot object. It winked and blinked white and red and started to shake the entire shelf.

Riley gripped the thrumming golden idol.

The entire vignette of her vision surged to blinding white and the screaming of the whispers might have been her own.

Or it could have been a chorus of the wretched tea-kettle screeches of gnashing teeth and slamming of thousands of rolling pins in an accursed trench some where far and deep. Her teeth ground down over the bitter meal of it and ichor ran over her tongue like melting chocolate.

Then it was gone.  

Millions of maws and hungry fingers were no longer digging blood out of the palm of her hand.

Her eyes glowed and smoldered red, hissing steam that smelled of rotting meat and vanilla extract.

Her grin stretched farther than the muscles of her mouth.

She had what she had always desired most. The power to shape the world.

But now all the voices were hers, well theirs, to be precise.

It was now time for them to go surprise their mother and brother with breakfast. And oh what a delicious surprise it would be...

 

 


End file.
